(We yield this space to the statement of the Alliance of Concerned Teachers due to its timeliness. – Ed.)
PRESIDENT Duterte failed to mention anything about the education sector during his last State of the Nation Address. This, despite education figuring as one of the most urgent national issues of late—with the recent closing of the gruelling distance learning’s first school year, the alarming international reports on the declining quality of Philippine education, the intensifying call for limited school reopening, and the uncertainties that haunt the opening of the school year in September.
If anything, it proved once again his total disregard for this vital social service which his government is mandated to provide. After all, what accomplishment can he speak of when the out-of-school youth and children increased by one million in the past year? When he hardly ever lifted a finger to aid the sector amidst the multiple crises plaguing the country? When he has forgotten altogether his promise to significantly increase teachers’ salaries? And when he has zero plans to stir the sector towards wherever direction he envisions?
The chronic crisis in the Philippine education system is exacerbated by the effects of the botched pandemic response in the last year. While access to and quality of education dramatically declined, teachers, students and parents suffered enormously with the absence of sufficient funding support and of prompt and sound education policies. The country tops the longest school lockdown in the Asia Pacific amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with still no end yet in sight as surges continue and President Duterte’s lack of any vision of safe school reopening amid the pandemic.
Teachers and education support personnel, who are and always have been at the frontlines of education delivery, were again denied due recognition and support from the President despite them bearing the brunt of this state mandate. While teachers are forced to make do with the meager salary adjustment from Duterte’s salary standardization law, more of which were used to cover the costly and undersupported learning modalities amid the pandemic, President Duterte ensured the interests of his police and military personnel — whose salaries he already doubled — by calling on Congress to pass their pension reform. The provision of basic benefits for teachers such as their overtime pay for working continuously beyond the maximum 220 work days as provided by the law, without any leave privileges, cannot even be guaranteed by this government.
Duterte’s abandonment of education cannot be made clearer. The education sector is therefore implored to continue and intensify its just fight for safe and accessible quality education for the sake of the youth, our education workers, and of the future of the nation.
